About Me

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The Angel of the North is an Antony Gormley sculpture and the photo in my banner is from Freefoto.com. Other elements are stamps (CHF Beautiful & Cracked Montana Earth) and computer generated text.

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Monday, 16 April 2012

It's challenge time at Tando Creative and our theme this month is "Green and Yellow".

I've made a simple canvas this month. I used watercolour crayons in shades of green and yellow to scribble directly onto the canvas and blended with gesso.

I sponged ink over the Random Circles mask and then stamped the leaves. I used green and yellow acrylic paint to paint over the stamping and left all but one of them as basic shapes. On the last one, I added some veining with dark brown paint and also scratched through the layers of paint with a pin and finally added a drop shadow with the brown paint.

The chipboard domino is triple embossed with a word stamp pressed in and then picked out with some more acrylic paint.

Thanks for stopping by! If you fancy having a play with this springtime colour combo we'd love to have you join us and if your project is picked in the random draw at the end of the month you can pick out a lovely Tando prize! Challenge details here.

Saturday, 7 April 2012

Papercrafts magazine is celebrating its Pratical Solutions for Papercrafters special issue this week with a whole bunch of challenges on Cath Edvalson's Moxie Fab blog.

I thought I'd play along in the "Household Items" challenge and made this card.

I've used two household items - a facial tissue and kitchen foil.

The foil was simply stuck to some cardstock and embossed with a Spellbinder folder. I scribbled over with a pink Copic marker and then sanded to give a sort of brushed metal look with a hint of pink in the low spots.

The sentiment is heat embossed in silver to go with the foil.

I remember making piles of flowers from coloured tissues when I was a kid to decorate a village carnival float. We must have been pretty sure it wasn't going to rain!

This is a smaller version of those flowers - I started by cutting strips about 2" wide from a tissue and then layered, concertina folded and wired in the middle of the strip. I rounded the petal ends, ran a marker around them and then carefully separated the layers to make a fluffy bloom. The centre is Glossy Accents with some nail art microbeads sprinkled on.

Tuesday, 3 April 2012

Our challenge for March over on UKStampers is to take inspiration from a modern (fairly abstract) painter and alter something.

I've altered a chipboard domino to make a pendant inspired by Gustav Klimt. I didn't look at a particular work of his, I just worked on my association of him with rich green and gold and fluid curved lines.

I didn't have black UTEE which is the ideal for this "faux cloisonne" technique so I used three coats of clear with black pigment ink and then a coat of black detail embossing powder just to make sure! The final surface is coated with Versamark and dusted with a couple of colours of Perfect Pearls, reheated to melt before pressing the stamp into the soft surface.

Once it was cool, I used a Versamark pen and added a little more Perfect Pearls to a few circles. I gave the whole thing a couple of coats of Klear floor polish to give it some sheen. This is take two - the first one had a coat of Glossy Accents on it which I left to dry overnight. This morning it was cloudy in the middle and had deep splits in three or four places - I guess it didn't like the non-porous surface!